Good Night, Mr. Wodehouse

by Faith Sullivan

  Catching sight of the sudden flame of a freshly lit lamp, Hilly threw his head back, laughed, and pointed. “Light,” Elvira told him. He tried to repeat the word, but “light” was difficult, and every time came out as “wite.” Still, Elvira told him that he was a good boy.

  Sometimes they helped Nell by picking up items fallen to the floor, or checking the cloakroom for lunch buckets and mittens. If the appointed monitor had failed to stay behind to wash the chalkboard, Elvira and Hilly carried the galvanized pail to the pump in the yard and fetched water to scrub it. “Isn’t this fun?” Elvira asked, and the lad clapped his hands.

  On the way home, the three occasionally stopped in the pharmacy for aspirin or mentholatum. Inhaling odors edgy and foreign, Elvira lingered over exotic treasures, identifying each for Hilly. “Dr. Aspenwall’s Cure for Gout, whatever that is. We’ll ask your mama. And here’s Neat’s-Foot Oil. Ma puts that on her feet in the winter.” In the grocery store, shopping for potatoes, Elvira cooed, “Green beans in a can, Hilly, imagine that.”

  Elvira soon became a familiar face in Harvester. She was a friendly little thing, eager to know everything she could be taught, whether it was the meaning of “gout” or the price of a railway ticket to Chicago. “Not that I plan to go there,” she told the depot agent, “But you never know . . . do you?”

  The Lundeens were taken with her. “That girl knows how to work,” Mr. Lundeen told Nell when she ran into him in the meat market. “We’ll have work for her through January, maybe later. Juliet thinks Elvira’s the cat’s whiskers.”

  By now, young George Lundeen had returned from his Grand Tour, a graduation gift from his parents. At the dry-goods store, he was training to take over management from his father, who was increasingly tied up at the new Square Deal Lumberyard across the street from the depot.

  Sitting at the battered oak table one night, spreading apple butter on a slice of bread, Elvira told Nell, “Mr. George really hoped to go into the bank, but his pa wants to start him out in the store.”

  “My goodness, how do you know that?”

  “You hear things.”

  “Have you met him?”

  “Last Saturday. He’s very nice. No airs, even though he’s been to Paris and Rome and almost everywhere.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him,” Nell said, cutting cheese into small pieces for Hilly. “He must have graduated from high school about the time Herbert and I came here.”

  “He’s very good looking.”

  “I heard somewhere—maybe at sodality—that he’s engaged to a girl from the East.”

  “Boston,” Elvira said.

  “You do have your ear to the ground.”

  “In a dry-goods store you hear a lot. Especially about the owners.”

  “I suppose.” Nell held a cup of milk to Hilly’s mouth. “Think of it. Europe. It takes my breath away.”

  “Mine too. I’ve never even been to St. Bridget!”—the county seat.

  Sitting on the living-room floor by the three-foot-square hot-air register, Hilly played with a spoon and pie tin while Nell and Elvira washed and dried the dishes.

  “My Christmas vacation begins at the end of this week,” Nell told the girl. “If you’re planning to go home for a visit, better have someone fetch you.”

  “I don’t think they can spare me from the store,” Elvira said. “It’s so busy now, Mr. George says they can use me every day till Christmas.” She added, “That is, if you don’t mind looking after Hilly.” She wrung out the dishcloth and wiped down the oilcloth.

  “Are you disappointed not to go home?”

  “I’ve bought little presents for everyone. Mrs. Lundeen helped me pick out nice things I could afford, and then she gave me a discount because I’m an employee. Isn’t that something?” Setting the teakettle over a burner, Elvira continued, “Everybody at home’s going to be knocked off their feet. They never get anything new-bought except, you know, like a plow. When they see those presents, they’ll never miss me.”

  The little group celebrated Hilly’s third birthday on a December Sunday when the store was closed and Elvira could be present. After early Mass, Nell baked a cake and, once they’d all eaten potatoes and sausage, Elvira ran out to gather a bowl of fresh snow.

  “Hilly, it snowed just for you,” she told him as she stirred a little maple syrup into the bowl and spooned some of the mix over a slice of cake that Nell had torn into pieces. “Taste that, you little dumpling.”

  He dug in with both hands, stuffing cake into his mouth. “Nithe,” he mumbled.

  Once Hilly was asleep, Elvira sat near Nell and said, “When I told Mrs. Lundeen we were having Hilly’s birthday tonight, she sent this home for him.” She handed Nell a book, gorgeously bound.

  “Beautiful Stories About Children by Charles Dickens,” Nell read. “How will I ever repay the Lundeens?”

  “They don’t seem like people who expect it.”

  One day, Nell thought, maybe there’ll be something I can do.

  chapter six

  CHRISTMAS CAME AND WENT, and Elvira was still needed at the store on Saturdays. Early in February she told Nell that she was depositing a little money in the bank each week. “In the Bank of Harvester. Mr. Lundeen’s bank,” she added, as if there were another in town.

  “When you marry, you’ll have money of your own. That’s always a good thing,” Nell said. Indeed.

  “Maybe I won’t marry. Then I’ll really be glad I saved it.”

  The subject reminded Nell. “There’s a Valentine Dance at the hotel,” Nell said, laying aside the weekly Standard Ledger. Lately, Elvira had been giving the dances the go-by.

  “It’ll mostly be married people and girls with beaux,” Elvira said.

  “Nonsense. There’s bound to be unattached girls at a Valentine Dance. And boys. What if this is the dance where you lose your heart?”

  Wearing the rose party dress that Nell had made her at Christmas, Elvira did attend the dance. Nell waited up, now reading Pride and Prejudice, a loan from Juliet Lundeen. Jane Austen, despite being from a different place and time, well understood human frailties in their many costumes.

  Elvira should be reading novels and biographies. Life could toss your sanity about like a glass ball; books were a cushion. How on earth did nonreaders cope when they had nowhere to turn? How lonely such a nonreading world must be.

  But Elvira had demurred when Nell suggested sharing the books from Mrs. Lundeen. They were “too deep,” she’d said. Nell sighed now and rose to check on Hilly, tucking the quilts around his bootied feet. This room and her own were always cold in winter.

  Bertha Rabel had long ago given Nell lace curtains for the living-room window and those in the bedrooms. Though kindly meant, they did not keep out the cold.

  After setting the teakettle on the stove and heaving a chunk of firewood onto the embers, Nell struggled into her coat and slipped down to the street, stepping gingerly onto the snow and ice.

  At each corner of Main Street, a gas lamp was lit, but the stores, robbed of the light and vitality of the business day, stood bleak and black. In a village like Harvester, the collection of stores and offices strung loosely along Main Street—with odd little intervals here and there, like gaps between teeth—were the clearinghouses of news and gossip.

  Telephones were still a rarity. There were perhaps half a dozen in the town. Laurence Lundeen, with plans for the future of Harvester, had set up a telephone company, called Five Counties Telephone Communication. This involved installing a little switchboard in the office of the dry-goods store, where Anna Braun, the bookkeeper, could connect Edward Barnstable in his real-estate office with Dr. Gray in his office, one floor above.

  Similar switchboards were being installed in St. Bridget and Red Berry and not a few other towns in the area. Laurence was quoted in the Standard Ledger as saying that one day soon every household would possess a telephone. The idea gave Nell pause. Wasn’t it a little frightening, everything so instan
t? First the telegraph, now the telephone.

  She rubbed her bare hands and peered down Main Street toward the Harvester Arms Hotel. On the broad front porch, several young men huddled together, smoking or sharing a flask. Inside, all the lamps on the first floor were burning, and Nell thought she caught the strains of “After the Ball.” Herbert had been partial to that tune; its sadness fed something in him. She trembled, turning away from the sound.

  “You waited up,” Elvira said when she came home around half past eleven. An air of warmth clung about her despite the cold night.

  “I was reading and fell asleep. My, it’s chilly in here.” Nell’s shawl had slipped and she gathered it around her shoulders, shivering. “The fire’s gone out.” Rabel’s, downstairs, let their fire die at night, so no heat rose through the register until morning, when the shop reopened.

  Elvira slipped out of her coat, hanging it on a hook by the door. “Should I start the cookstove?”

  “No. We’ll be going to bed. I don’t like to waste the wood.”

  “I’ll get into my nightdress, then.”

  “How was the dance?” Nell asked, rising.

  “Dull as dishwater for an hour, but then Mr. George stopped in,” Elvira said, returning with her nightdress in hand. “He knows so many dance steps—steps nobody around here’s even heard of.” She wandered into the kitchen to see if the stove still held any heat. “And he showed us how to do them. Things got lively then! I wish you’d been there.”

  Back in the living room, Elvira went on, “There’s still a tiny bit of heat in the stove if you want to undress out there before it’s all gone.”

  “I think I will. I should have heated bricks for the beds before the fire died. Wear your heavy woolen socks,” Nell cautioned, leaving to fetch her gown.

  When she returned, Elvira was riffling the first pages of Pride and Prejudice. “‘It is a truth universally acknowledged,’” she read, stumbling only a little, “‘that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’ What does that mean?”

  “What do you think it means?”

  Elvira wrinkled her brow. “That girls think rich men want . . . or should want . . . to get married?”

  “I expect that’s about it.”

  “I wonder if that’s what Mr. George’s fiancée thought.”

  “Why do you wonder?”

  “Well, she’s marrying a rich man, isn’t she?”

  Nell considered. “But she’s probably marrying him for love.”

  Elvira laid the book back on the table. “Some men probably get more than their fair share of love.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Think about it. A man like Mr. George, for instance. He’s got money and looks and nice ways. Lots of girls must have set their caps for him. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “To other men?” Nell asked.

  “To other girls.”

  Had Nell set her cap for a husband? She didn’t think so. But she’d been fresh from college, teaching certificate in hand, with no prospects. Hanging around Nora and Paddy O’Neill’s farm, where she was an extra mouth, had been unthinkable.

  Then, she’d met Herbert at a village dance. He’d been a roustabout with a lumber outfit up north but was on his way to Harvester, having already taken the job at Kolchak’s. “I’ve been looking for a town job. Not much advancement in lumbering.”

  “Got the letter here,” he went on, patting his shirt pocket, “from my schoolmate Ted Shuetty. Says the boss will hold the job till I get there. Ted’s given him a pretty good spiel about how hard I work. Besides, I got relations near Harvester.” He spun Nell through a waltz. “Just stopping over a couple of days with cousins here in Woodridge.”

  Two days later he asked her to marry him, and she said yes. Was love any part of it? She doubted.

  But when they danced, the firm pressure of his hand on the small of her back had caused her to feel out of control. He’d had extraordinary hands. Nell turned on her side now, in her dark bed, with none but her own clumsy hand for excitement.

  chapter seven

  “ISN’T THIS EXCITING!” Nell said, settling into the rocker.

  Late in May of 1902, Nell and Elvira received invitations to the June wedding of Cora Mary Pendleton and George Laurence Lundeen in the Methodist Episcopal Church of Harvester and to the reception following, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Laurence Lundeen of 248 Catalpa Street.

  An interview in the Standard Ledger quoted Miss Pendleton: “I want to acquaint myself with George’s world as quickly as possible, so I’ve chosen to be married in Harvester rather than Boston. George grew up here, and I know that I shall love it.”

  The article further stated that a considerable number of family and friends would be journeying by train from the East. “The charming Miss Pendleton laughed, saying, ‘Daddy has pretty much booked up the Harvester Arms.’” It was noted that Miss Pendleton had graduated from the Greybriar School for Young Ladies in the Berkshires.

  “This calls for new dresses,” Nell told Elvira, laying her invitation on the end table beside a stack of third-grade geography tests. “I haven’t had a new summer dress since I was married. Have you seen a fabric at Lundeen’s that you like?”

  “Haven’t looked,” Elvira said without glancing up from the floor, where she and Hilly were building a house of blocks.

  “I think it’s a good sign that Miss Pendleton wants to marry here, among George’s people,” Nell said. “It shows that she really loves him and wants to fit in.”

  “What’s a ‘school for young ladies’?”

  “A finishing school, I suppose. Where families send their girls to learn to be ladies,” Nell said, taking up the geography. “They learn French and German or Italian so they’ll feel at home in Europe. And I suppose they learn how to entertain and dress and carry on a conversation.”

  “I used to speak a little German,” Elvira said. “We had a hired man taught me some.”

  “It must be grand to speak foreign languages . . . like being able to play the piano or sing an operatic aria. I wonder if Miss Pendleton plays the piano.”

  Rising from the floor, Elvira said, “I’ll start supper.” At the kitchen doorway she turned. “An operatic area?”

  In Lundeen’s the following Saturday, Nell decided on ivory linen and lace to sew a boudoir pillow for a wedding gift, then chose a soft lilac yardage for her new summer dress.

  “And a yard or so of lilac ribbon to trim your hat?” prompted Elvira, who was waiting on her.

  “Perfect. But how about you? Have you found a fabric you like? The peach lawn is very pretty. I was tempted myself.”

  “I don’t think I’ll go to the wedding,” Elvira murmured.

  “Not go?” Nell was taken aback. But Marcella Kolchak was approaching with a packet of needles in hand, and Nell said no more.

  Elvira had taken a sandwich to work with her, so Nell didn’t see her again until the store closed. The May evening was warm and Main Street was noisy with the Saturday-night crowd. Nell sat by Hilly’s open window, watching the throng below as it fetched and flowed, sweeping along smoothly here, eddying there, folks laughing and calling to each other as if Saturday night in town were the grandest regalement to be found.

  The women in their Saturday best hesitated over a yard of lace in Lundeen’s, parted with a bit of egg money for a bag of horehound drops in Petersen’s, loitered in little clots along the walk, then gossiped in wagons and buggies. Nell longed to be down there, strolling among them, catching their fun, warming herself at their fever.

  She needed to laugh. Some best part of herself—her wild humanity—was held in a closed fist, had been since . . . well, for a long time.

  George Lundeen’s wedding would be her “coming out.” Nearly a year would have passed since Herbert’s death. After the wedding she would begin accepting invitations, should any come her way. She’d once known how to play whist. And though she had lived in Harvester for only three yea
rs and wasn’t universally acquainted, she hoped to cultivate a little social life, maybe with the other teachers.

  Observing Elvira leaving Lundeen’s, slouching along Main Street looking like the frayed end of a rope, Nell went to the kitchen to fetch cold tea for them both. The day had been hot and dusty, hotter in the dry-goods store than anywhere, she didn’t doubt. Fortunately, the iceman had delivered a fresh block that day.

  “You’re wilting.” She handed Elvira the tea as the girl let the screen door close behind her.

  Elvira set the glass on the living-room table, sank into the rocker, and began unlacing her shoes, sighing and groaning as they came loose. When her feet were free and she had rubbed and stretched them, she took up the glass and drank.

  “I’ll fix us bread and butter,” Nell said. “Brown sugar on it?”

  “Mmmhmm.” Elvira rose. “I’ll shuck outta my dress.”

  In that muslin nightdress she looks about fourteen, Nell thought, as Elvira slumped onto a kitchen chair. “When’s your birthday?”

  “Same day as Mr. George’s wedding. June 16,” Elvira told her.

  “Is that why you don’t want to go to the wedding?” Nell laid a plate of bread on the table.

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think the Lundeens will be hurt if you stay away?” Elvira shrugged and bit into a slice of bread.

  “Is anything wrong at work?”

  Elvira shook her head, then wiped her mouth. “I like the Lundeens. They’re good people.” She was near tears.

  “Well, then?”

  “I’m not a lady. I hadda leave school when I was twelve. I don’t know anything.”

  Nell raised her brows. “You know how to keep house and care for a baby and work in a dry-goods store. You can read and write. You have curiosity. You have a good heart. Without that, any lady’s counterfeit.”

  “You’re just trying to make me feel better, and that’s because you’re a lady. . . .”